Cubit in Review – Multi-Dimensional Block Moving Madness

Puzzle games are probably one of my favorite type of game for killing time. They are usually pretty straight forward, but you have to actually think a little bit and use logic to work out how you are going to achieve the task. I’ve played a few here and there. Some hits, some misses. Recently I was fortunate enough to get my hands on the first release from dev. duo Inkling Games’ Cubit. Described as having “..3D puzzles, with a 2D twist”. Reading that not only confused me, but made me want to learn more.

Stepping away from the smooth and polished color-rich designs of other games, Cubit keeps the design simple, easy to understand and functional. The background has a look of crumpled paper and any features look like slightly altered simple lines or text. Colors are mostly black and white with some highlights in blue and yellow. Although the design is REALLY simple, it works. When things move or shift around theres no clipping or lag, no weird shading or color issues.

Menu options from the main page are Play, Levels, Options and Help. The help page is where you will find the game tutorial. Although shown to you at first launch, if you happen to forget anything about game play it’s right there for you to review. The options menu is slim, only allowing you to control sounds and saving your Twitter account info (I’ll touch on that later). Levels is where you will see how far up the difficulty ladder you’ve gone. Also from there you can select any of the unlocked difficulty modes and levels.

The game itself is straightforward. You have 3 sides set up in a “open-faced” cube. There’s the Front, Side and Top. Your main objective is to move around the blocks that you see on your board so that none of them are on top of the numbers printed on the grid. But at the same time, you have to makue sure that the number of blocks that touch one of the grid numbers corresponds with the number itself (e.g. a number 2 should have 2 blocks touching it on any of its sides).

Moving the blocks around is a 2 part process. Being a 3D game, you aren’t stuck just viewing the board as is. You can move the board all around to get whatever view you want, making it a lot easier to see where you have room to move pieces. The pieces themselves can move all over the place as well (up/down, left/right, back/forward). After you finish a level, you are treated to another surprise. After each level, you have the ability to post your score to Twitter. So you can show off to all your friends how much better than them you are.

Aside from the overly simple design which may turn some people off, there really isn’t anything bad to say about Cubit. Simple, fun, effective. With 100 levels spread over 5 difficulty modes, if you are a fan of puzzle games, you’ll have difficulty putting this one down.